The Rise and Ruin of Locust City, an all-too-Elysium Story.

I doubt that anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Disco Elysium, its meteoric success and the cataclysmic fall that followed. I often think how hard being a Disco fan must be these days. All you hear about is the lawsuits, corruption, infighting, allegations of toxicity and yes, more infighting. With that in mind I hesitate to write this. After all Zaum studio’s doors closed behind me a year and a half ago, why stir the pot again?

The defamatory statements my former home-studio decided to give People Make Games for their follow-up episode to the Disco Elysium story — great documentary by the way, I sincerely recommend watching it — is the reason why. I want to challenge them. Hard and with evidence.

You see, due to rigid libel laws in the United Kingdom even the best of journalists are fairly limited in what they can and cannot cover. You either abide by these laws or you’re out, it’s that easy. Even for a regular Joe or Jolene it’s more than a little risky to just slam all their collected evidence on the public table. If you’re going against a corporate entity there’s a million little ways they can lawyer-fuck you. So what can easily happen is that you spend years watching your back, collecting evidence, running everything by your trade guild representative and *still* when the hammer falls it’s your word against theirs cause showcasing your evidence is a risk no one can afford to take. And the suits know that. They also know that nothing really happens if they make a false statement with zero evidence. Worst case scenario: retract the statement and make a lawyerly-worded apology. 9999 Joe-Joeline’s out of 10,000 can’t afford a lengthy defamation lawsuit to contest it. In fact, they can’t afford the first consultation with a lawyer. Of course anyone can send out a cease & desist but if it’s coming from someone who’s was already making a below-average wage then you (yes, suit, you) know they can’t enforce it so who gives a shit?

The studio who brought you fruity and forbidden — their words, not mine — “Collage Mode”, “trust-fund tare-bag” and “What if Disco Elysium but from Temu?” has given PMG a number of false statements regarding myself and Dora Klindžić. In my experience, post-termination character assassinations were a disturbing pattern inside the studio, and fearing for my future I started keeping records of my interactions in the studio all the way from early 2022.

In order to respect your time and fit within the limitations of the medium I try to be brief and not to cram every little thing in here. In fact there’s space for only the bare minimum. Where ever possible I try to protect the identities of people not involved (or minimally involved) in the shady dealings inside the studio. I do not extend the same courtesy to the upper-management and people who’ve been directly involved in the studio’s wrongdoings or numerous coverups. Guise of ‘protecting identities’ is one of the most effective tools of these corporate crooks who build walls of anonymous meat around them to avoid responsibility. This ends now.

Let’s go in chronological order…

In June of 2022 studio’s two newest directors, writing director Justin Tyler Keenan and art director Kaspar Tamsalu, meet with Chief Creative Officer Kaur Kender and his romantic partner in a hotel room in New York. In a span of a week (give or take a day or two) the quartet puts together the concept codenamed C4.

PMG’s claim that Dora and myself were part of that trip is an honest mistake. I don’t hold it against them, this story is as information dense as they come, but the truth is we were nowhere near C4’s inception.

Whether it was usual ‘for Argo to be absent from the genesis of C4’ is questionable. Being the last remaining Disco-writer and the key-member of the Y12 (Disco Elysium sequel) writing team still working on the sequel while these events unfolded, I would push back on that and say that it actually *was* unusual for me to be excluded from these conversations. It is true that I was not employed in a leadership role at the time but alongside Justin and Dora I was carrying out senior duties in the Y12 writing team including conducting job interviews with the candidates for the expanding writing team. In fact the only person on what became C4 writing team that I didn’t personally interview and approve was a friend Justin brought in from his college days. Great guy, good writer, I genuinely enjoyed working with him.

I’m gonna stick with ‘unusual’ on their first claim.

The first whiff I was given of C4 was 24h before it was announced to the entire studio over an all-hands zoom call. It was on a 1–1 zoom call with Justin. The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes and I was so shocked I can barely recall it. Y12 is out, C4 is in. Roll with it. Justin told me to keep it secret for 24h but gave me access to the C4 Miro board ahead of the next day’s announcement. I didn’t want to be in (further) emotional turmoil over something I can’t discuss with my partner — and Justin had specifically told me not to tell Dora — so I avoided the board till the studio-wide announcement next day.

So Zaum’s claim that Argo’s feedback was requested when C4 was just a kernel of an idea is not inherently false. They just fail to add that so was the feedback of every other employee of the studio since the Executive Producer Tõnis Haavel, (who internally goes by Denis Havel to obscure his past criminal conviction in Estonia) specifically said in the end of the announcement zoom-call that everyone is welcome to comment on the Miro board. That’s how confident the management was in their new project.

For the sake of brevity I’ll skip over the chaos that unrolled due to “everyone should comment” policy on the Miro board the following week. It became unruly to say the least. People were reprimanded for expressing their opinion. Since I was one of the most senior people in the studio and friends with Justin at the time I refrained from commenting as to not undermine his authority. This brings us to the studio’s next statement…

Despite having very serious quality concerns neither Dora nor myself publicly badmouthed the project. The opposite is actually true. When concerned colleagues came to us after harsh reactions to their comments on the Miro board from writing director Keenan and art director Tamsalu, we assured them we are aware of the issue and that we’ll figure this out, don’t worry.

A week after C4 announcement I write this to Justin in Telegram…

Justin got back to me the same day with an encouraging reply…

Skipping over some more or less minor events — like art director Tamsalu coming to our house in Brighton, through the back door (why, dude?) to convince us, senior writers, that C4’s story and world-building is actually very good — and jumping ahead to 1st of July. Dora and I fly out to NYC where C4’s first ever f-2-f writer meetup followed by a 2- week workshop is about to go down.

On 2nd of July Dora and I meet with Justin in a park in NYC. It’s a long and emotional meeting but we reach an agreement that despite creative disagreements we’re all gonna dedicate the upcoming 2 weeks of in-person collaboration time for figuring out the C4 concept.

The next morning Justin summons us to a caffe in the neighborhood via slack-message and informs us we’ve been removed from the project and are being sent back home to England to face CCO Kaur Kender. He’ll decide what to do with us. The meeting only takes about 45 minutes and is awkward but friendly. In the end Justin suggests we could talk to HR (Gaby) to exchange our tickets so we could stay in NY for one more day to experience the American Independence day. We hug it out before parting ways.

More than a year later Tõnis, desperate to get rid of me, offhandedly accuses me of toxicity towards Justin. This is what I replied and I stand 100% behind it today as I did then.

Nine days after writing director Justin Keenan REMOVES us from the C4 writing team C4's lead-producer Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe lies to a former team member of ours that we’re “working on Disco stuff”.

In conclusion, you would think that a majority-remote working studio would have mountains of evidence of two rogue writers publicly calling its flagship project shit, right? Or if not mountains then *some* at least? In the era following ousting two *allegedly* toxic leads one would assume precautions are taken to prevent things like that from happening, right?

WRONG. There’s nothing cause it didn’t happen. We parted ways quietly and only voiced our concern to the in-house communist-placeholder, HR lead Patrick Norberg — trust him guys, he reads Marx before bed — and the leadership, CCO Kaur Kender and in February 2023 to Executive Producer Tõnis Haavel.

Moving on…

First, one would again think that the studio using words like ‘track record’ would also be able to showcase some of them ‘records’, right?

I worked in various legal entities making up Zaum studio for seven years. More than half of it fully remote with all communication taking place on-line. That seems like a sufficient amount of time to not only gather evidence of such disturbing behavior but to also do something about it, no? Why would you fire Rostov and Robert on incredibly dubious charges of toxicity and Helen on literally nothing and let a man with a track record of “describing every project he is not personally involved with as excrement” stick around? Sounds like a huge libel risk, no? Definitely not someone you should send to talk to reporters when the studio’s reputation is already — here it comes, excremental language — in the shitter, right?

The truth is there is no such records. I *have* been critical of projects/ideas/initiatives in the studio that in my opinion do not live up to the standards of creative quality set by Disco Elysium. And having been an essential part of building up the studio I feel I have earned that right.

I don’t think C4 came near those standards. Pioneer One was internally called Potjomkin One cause people including myself, Justin Keenan and many others believed Kaur and Tõnis are prepping to sell the studio and P1 is meant to fool a naive buyer into thinking we are a multi-project studio. I also severely disliked Zaum abolishing the ‘no alcohol’ policy after Kaur was fired.

Still, in all of the above cases and beyond I retained awareness of people’s feelings and never publicly critiqued the projects I wasn’t part of. If you, Zaum, claim otherwise then back it up with evidence. Until then your statement is text-book defamation.

“But Argo, you called “Collage Mode” an ‘absolute garbage’ in the first PMG documentary!” — I did indeed. Although I had very little insight into Collage Mode in general, I wrote couple of internal area- briefs for it. Still, I was shocked to see my name in the credits, mortified that Disco fans would think that Collage Mode is representative of the quality they can expect from the upcoming X7. Me saying that was a deliberate attempt to draw attention both inside and outside the studio to the fact that things are far from alright. I did afterwards apologize to the three people management pointed me to — didn’t know yet how big of a role Tõnis himself had played — and for better or worse the outcry pushed the studio to form a ‘Quality committee’ to prevent further fiascos akin to Collage Mode.

Perhaps publicly calling Collage Mode absolute garbage did earn me a ‘track record’. I guess I could’ve just said “the emperor is naked” instead of “the emperors veiny cock and hairy balls are right in my face”. Don’t know if it would have led to a Franchise Committee formation though.

Furthermore…

As this statement reads like Argo’s behavior was something that needed to be addressed frequently one would once again assume that since Argo was working fully remotely there would be tons of evidence to support that. Chatlogs from Slack or external messengers? Email chains? Offensive comments on Miro boards? Snarky back-talk in Jira? HR meetings in calendar? *With a repeat-offender — recidivist if you will — like that Argo-guy there’s probably records somewhere of some disciplinary action, no? Suspension? Pay decrease? Demotion?* I mean you can’t tell me you let this madman just terrorize a studio of more than hundred people over seven years and didn’t do anything about it?

Moving on…

The ironically named Ministry of Truth started out promising. Unfortunately something Dora and I quickly learned was that our fellow- ministers were annoyed more than anything else with suggestions aligning with the original intent of the group’s formation, that being the integrity of the Disco Elysium IP.

Some things — you *don’t* want to know — we were able to indeed ‘nip in the bud’. Others not. Listening to the audio from these meetings I see how president Tomaszewski grows increasingly more frustrated with myself and Dora. Right before Christmas we have a discussion over Disco’s PS store ‘Christmas card’. My heart freezes when I hear something already exists. Head of Publishing shows it off.

I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want to point to the obvious: Christmas doesn’t exist in Elysium. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Representation of Cuno and Cunoesse is the bottom. That’s kinda serious considering X7’s (admittedly unrealistic) launch date is in less than 12 months. I ask if we can have one day with the artist, or even couple of hours. I swear we can make something that communicates the same holiday vibe but is holistic with Disco and the world of Elysium. They all look at me like I’m the most difficult person in the world. Maybe I am but I thought this was exactly what this committee was for. “Everybody does it. It’s not a big deal. Yeah, but this already exists. Look, it’s just a game.” is the resounding consensus as the committee decides to go with the non-canon Christmas card. Dora and I don’t get invited to further Ministry of Truth meetings.

But I digress and you probably want to hear about Locust City.

After being removed from C4 in July we wait for about a month for CCO Kaur Kender to return from sickleave. Once back he expresses joy over ‘having us all to himself’ and gives us a task to come up with a concept for a stand-alone expansion to Disco Elysium. Dora and I are against making an Elysium-game. We argue that it will make the studio come off as creatively bankrupt. We want a new start and we want to challenge ourselves. Management disagrees and insists: it has to be a disco-expansion.

We were not really in a position to argue and after thinking a bit on how to innovate on existing formula — in all fairness the innovations came mostly from Dora — and who the right POV character(s) would be for the job we presented the management with X7.

This post has already becoming cyclopean in size so I’m not gonna go into details about the early development of X7. It took off way better than we had anticipated. Better than anyone had anticipated I dare to say. On Zaum’s 2022 Christmas party in the BAFTA-house in London, Dora and I first present the project to the rest of the studio. It is met with overwhelming excitement by our colleagues. I think everyone felt afterwards that perhaps there’s hope still for the studio.

At this point it’s worth mentioning that Zaum has a conflicted relationship with the concept of pre-production. Disco didn’t really have one, neither did C4. P1 was basically 5 years of pre-preproduction and X7 didn’t get one either. Very early in the project Dora and I found ourselves in a situation where the other teams were asking for briefs for sections or characters of the game that didn’t yet exist or systems no one had thought about yet. When the X7 team was still around 10 people it was somehow manageable. Difficult but manageable. But as more people joined we knew we needed writing assistance, since at the end of the day we were making a narrative-driven RPG.

We first ask for writing help before 2022 Christmas, even have candidates in mind. Management shoots it down. We keep asking over the the spring of 2023. I propose that perhaps a couple of writers from C4 could lend us a hand since they all joined to (and were hired for) work on an Elysium-project. Management refuses.

Things come to a halt in May 2023 when news of P1's pending cancellation starts spreading and in a meeting with Dora and Chris Priestman, Lead- Producer Phil Davidson and I are arguing over the future of the writing team.

I once again propose getting help from the writers on C4, which is at the time going through a second great reset. I argue that since we’re making an Elysium-game then it makes much more sense to enlist the help of people we already hired for Elysium projects. Furthermore, because P1 was forever stuck in pre-production limbo, then contrary to C4 the writers working on the project had not yet learned how to use Articy, the primary dialogue writing tool for all projects. So essentially we would have to start from scratch with them. And because Dora and I were already struggling splitting our time between keeping other X7 teams supplied with work and feedback and getting our own writing done, it seemed like having to start tutoring an inexperienced writing team from the ground up with the release date less than a year away is sheer madness. I felt more than anything that the management’s decision to not allow C4 writers to help out on X7 was emotional more than anything else because multiple writers had expressed the desire to help with X7.

You can probably see Turdgate approaching a mile away. Phil is getting more and more frustrated with me and I with him. About 45 minutes into an hour long meeting he finally slams it on the table. Ultima Ratio. “Either the P1 writing team joins X7 or the project will be cancelled.” Have you ever seen a grown man fail an Authority check right in front of you? I have. “I’d rather have it cancelled than make a turd,” I retort. Those exact words.

Dora jumps in to diffuse the situation. Priestman hasn’t said a word in 15 minutes. Clearly emotions have boiled over. We part ways and Phil goes to Tõnis. I go to X7 team retro. In the “what went wrong this sprint” section of the retro I state ‘project cancellation should not be used as a bargaining chip’ and share with the team what happened. I assure them Phil has no authority to make such claims — something both Tõnis and president Tomaszewski later confirm.

I expected more to come out of this. Either Phil being reprimanded or myself having a discussion with HR but nothing happens. Not until 19th of June 2023, weeks after X7 had absorbed P1 writing team, when during a writing team structure discussion Executive Producer Tõnis Haavel orders Lead Producer Phil Davidson to repeat my words from “Turdgate” in front of former P1 Lead Writer Jim Ashilevi, Chris Priestman, Dora, and myself. The purpose of this, he later explains, is educational. If *I* felt comfortable sharing Phil’s project cancellation ultimatum with the X7 team then why wouldn’t he repeat *my* words back to Jim?

The meeting was an absolute disaster and derailed the writing team structure talks for many weeks, spawning multiple unavoidable meetings to address what had happened that day.

When the “Turdgate” call ends, the first thing I do is write Jim…

When I finish I see Tõnis has already messaged me in Slack…

I didn’t feel it as strongly back then but re-reading this now I feel anger rising over this “outside work”, “tonight”, “let’s just meet like friends” approach. This is isolationist abuser-talk, creep-style. I have never been on a walk with Tõnis Haavel or friends with him. Or even alone with him since 2017 when we had a ‘development talk’ in the Tallinn office.

That moment onwards I felt uncomfortable being alone with him and I asked someone from HR to sit in in our future interactions.

Describing X7 during the structure talks, the ups and downs — mostly the latter — the project went through between 2023 July and the end of November when we finished a 2h playable build for internal showcase is a multi hour ordeal in itself so I’ll save it for another time.

Important to note is:

* X7 project absorbed most of the ‘paused’ P1 people. Few went to C4.

* While *technically* X7 writing team doubled in size the writing itself stopped completely. Production had assigned us a 2-month tutorialization period during which Dora and I were supposed to bring new writers up to speed. I’ve said in multiple interviews that at an average it took a Disco writer anywhere between 4 to 6 months to be able to write for Disco Elysium without supervision. I had learned even slower.

* Although the writing had grounded to a halt the other teams that had doubled in size were working twice as fast now. And predictably the problem of not being able to supply artists with briefs, designers with feedback, etc. grew ever more severe.

* In the background, Tõnis and the studios new president Ed Tomaszewski were trying to force into existence some kind of structure where Jim from cancelled P1 would become a writing team lead. Chris would be an interim lead for the other two new writers from P1 and Dora and I would essentially be just writers on the project. The problem was that they were afraid to communicate the new structure to the rest of X7 cause Dora and I were well liked and this announcement would have caused project-wide bad blood. So management kept stalling and forbade us to communicate anything to the team. I cannot even begin to describe the stress and isolation this forced silence brought not just to us but the entire X7 team.

* People started complaining about burnout, feeling lost and communication issues on Retrospectives. Crying too.

* The two-month tutoring period for new writers — all wonderful, talented people — went on for four months. The communication inside the team was made extra difficult by Tõnis arbitrarily enforcing a rule that I am only allowed to give writing feedback to new writers through Director of Business Development, Chris Priestman. Priestman was then to pass it on and bring back whatever questions there might have been. Super-efficient system, I know.

Finally it seems like we’ve reached some kind of a structure. Not what ZAUM claims below but SOMETHING that’s not this standstill limbo anymore. At last Dora and I are able to take a vacation. First since the one I took with Robert, Rostov, Helen and Yuan in Cornwall back in 2021 for me. First — and only — in Zaum, period, for Dora.

Three days in Estonia, outside of crunch, outside of meetings about meetings, sprints, slack and Jira, after multiple full nights’ sleep I see X7 with absolute clarity. The project is completely fucked. The team is already burning out and we’re basically making a vertical slice still. Communication between teams is rerouted through a network of middle-men all reporting to Tõnis. Where once it took 5 minutes to hop on a call with someone and another 30 to quickly bang something out, it now is a two week ordeal where first you have to go to your lead who will then have a producer check everyone’s schedules get back to the lead and then you… The inefficiency this introduced is indescribable. Every creative team on X7 was complaining about it. Quality was dropping left and right. Things didn’t look, feel or read Elysium any more. There wasn’t a single game-ready dialogue and some critical systems had not even been fully tested (and I speculated would need extensive rework). And everyone in my team was on the brink of exhaustion.

Since P1 was “paused’’ and C4 was still in its 2nd Great Reset, X7 seemed like the only chance the studio had. And I knew the only way X7 wouldn’t collapse under its own weight was to take extreme measures, immediately.

Back from the vacation I set up the meeting with Ed, Tõnis and Ilmar and propose to downsize the team into a small agile spike team. I propose myself as the official Game Director of X7 and as part of the spike team I include Robert and Rostov in consulting roles since ultimately I believe repairing that relationship is the only thing that would save the studio from certain death. I also list 22 people working on X7 the studio would have to find positions on different projects. If not I promise to personally make them redundant.

Unsurprisingly the management did *not* like my proposal. Who could have guessed?

And just like that it was once again time to return to work in the shit factory.

Ed gets back to me with basically a non-answer. It’s diplomatic but doesn’t really say anything. Too boring to waste your time with it. The only line worth paying attention to is this:

This is insane-man behavior. You have never met Robert and you dare to call him ‘one of the most toxic creatives in the industry’? Did Tõnis eat your brain, Tomaszewski?

What Tõnis did to me, Jim, Phil and the entire X7 writing team on that fateful 19th of June afternoon is *way* worse than anything I ever saw Robert do. Robert could be impatient, borderline inconsiderate, sometimes a little rude, but I never saw him being malicious. And Tõnis acted with deliberate malice. Do you need to hear the audio?

So the management rejects my proposal to downsize X7 to an agile spike team. Work continues, people burn, deadline approaches.

For clarity I’m trying to focus on my own story more than anything but in the background another storm has been brewing. Dora will describe her struggles herself — and they are way worse than mine — but the short of it is she informs HR that she’s going to submit a formal complaint for all the harassment, bullying and discrimination Tõnis and his direct subordinates have put her through during her 2 years in the studio. She was doing the work of a co-director on X7 in the beginning, and in winter 2023 Tõnis essentially reduced her role to a junior writer in terms of responsibilities.

Two days before the day she had promised to file the grievance, Dora and I get a message from HR that a formal grievance has instead been launched against /us/ by our now former team-lead Jim on the grounds of creating a toxic workplace.

This comes as a complete shock. Never mind that Jim and I have been friends for a long time and always gotten along great, never mind that even during the last difficult months we’ve always tried to figure the situations out together, never mind that a harsh word has not been said between us… BUT our entire communication exists and is easily reviewable via slack messages and audio recordings.

On top of that little shocker I get an email from Tõnis:

And if I know one thing I know I like my Tõnis angry so I reply with…

Unfortunately my trade union representative is unable to join me in such short notice so I go to the London office alone on Monday morning.

This is how I describe it to my trade union representative afterwards:

Afterwards Tõnis and I exchange more emails…

I reply to Tõnis… (as I already showed you earlier):

Tõnis replies:

Meanwhile the investigation into my own allegedly toxic behavior takes place. PMG mistakenly described it as an external investigation. In reality it was an internal investigation conducted by Zaum HR department, specifically the newly appointed HR Lead, Gaby. She interviews me with my union rep present. He (the rep) later describes the interview as a fishing operation. Here‘s the protocol of the interview HR sent me and my union rep after the interview…

After the meeting I sent HR all my chatlogs with Jim and groupchats with Jim and myself in it.

Then Gaby comes back to me…

Gaby does send me the notes — the ones above — but never follows up with any additional questions.

A month later, when Tõnis is under investigation — more on that below — I ask my union rep if we should ask how Jim’s investigation is going. He says there’s no point and we should wait for Zaum’s next move.

And that’s it. I never hear from this again. No one ever gets back to me. Not Gaby, not anyone else from HR, not Tõnis, not Jim. There is no resolution, no further mention of the investigation. No closure. To this day I have no idea what happened, why my friend felt that our working relationship was toxic, why he didn’t feel comfortable talking to me about it or what exactly did I do to make him feel this way.

I am interviewed once more on 11th of January due to a *different* grievance, the one filed by Dora, where Tõnis Haavel is being investigated by an “independent” HR company. Independent in a sense that the same law firm who sends me legal threats about a year later left a blurb on that independent companies page, praising the ‘brilliant can-do approach’ of the woman who conducts the investigation into Tõnis Haavel’s misconduct. London is a small town and there’s only so many law-firms and independent HR outfits to go around. Some are bound to overlap. It’s a coincidence and nothing more. Don’t even bother asking “what are the odds?”. They are easily calculable.

The independent HR company Zaum studio hires to investigate the father of the son of CEO Ilmar Kompus’ wife’s sister, Chief Production Officer Tõnis Haavel finds him — wait for it — not-guilty. I know, I’m as shocked as you are. It’s crazy to think that way but it’s almost like companies don’t want to pay money for someone to say that their guys are in the wrong. Crazy!


_{‘Exceeded’ as in ‘did not abide by’?}

Dora will talk more about it in her own post. Before she can appeal the independent HR companies’ ‘not guilty’ conclusion to the investigation into convicted financial criminal Tõnis Haavel, Zaum’s management rushes to cancel project X7 where incidentally 90% of the witnesses listed in Dora’s grievance are working. That’s probably a coincidence as well.

I have never struggled more wrapping up a piece of writing cause there’s so much more I want to include but I feel this section of the article is already comparable to Steam-achievements of Pathologic 2…

So let’s wrap it. In February 2024 Zaum cancels X7 and announces redundancies in the studio.

An hour after the redundancy announcement all-hands zoom call where for the very first time in the studio’s history everyone’s microphones are disabled, I get an email from a journalist asking me if I want to comment on the redundancies. I do, I really *really* do.

This results in me being locked out of all of Zaum’s systems an hour after the article airs. A few days later I get this email from HR.

And two hours later, this:

I still attend a redundancy meeting the following week and it’s kind of hilarious. My trade union representative tears Tõnis Haavel a new one. The redundancy process is conducted so poorly I could almost certainly contest it. But there’s no real point to it since they’re gonna fire me for talking to the press (gross misconduct) anyways.

So on the advice of my trade union rep — bless the man, he was the real unsung hero of the story, amazing guy — I resign from my Principal Writer position in Zaum Studio on the 26th of February 2024.

Roll credits!

Despite spending so long writing this document that in the meantime C4’s trailer aired and I can now call it “Zero Parades” (it’s what you get when you type “No Truce” into Wish.com search bar), I have only skimmed the very surface of the clownshoe that is later-day Zaum. The redundancy process alone would could cover another twenty pages. And there is *so* much more. Some we covered in an episode(s) of Human Can Opener with The 41st Precinct.

The thing is I don’t really want to think about Zaum any more. Sure, the comedic value of its endless failures is undeniable — god even Geoff Keighley couldn’t say anything nice about the studio when ushering in the trailer — but the sad reality is that there are still people working there. Good people. People who for one reason or another can’t leave. And I may hate the grotesque parody of an art collective my home-studio became but I remember all too well what it was like to work there when everybody in the world hates you. And that’s not very funny.

In the end I want to leave you with this…

Till the next time.

Arx out.

/PS. I highly recommend reading Dora's response /to Zaum’s defamation as well./

/PPS. Zaum, I would like to end this matter here. You do you, I go my way. However if you keep trying to tarnish my reputation with baseless allegations you leave me no other choice than to showcase the evidence I collected (audio, video, etc) to protect myself against *exactly* this kind of defamation, in its entirety. Let’s drop hands and walk away./